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Social Media

I do social media for a living, and not just in the cheeky sense where I’m admitting—with a wink and a grin—that I use it too much. I mean that social media pays my bills. It helps put clothes on my children’s backs and food on our table. It allows me to take my wife […]

Twitter can be mean. It can be nasty. But sometimes it can be the little ray of sunshine that I imagine its creators always hoped it would be. It’s easy to forget, given what we sometimes see and hear and read. A couple of weeks ago, Jake Roberson chronicled the Twitter trolls who creeped out […]

If you’ve ever played an online role-playing game like, say, World of Warcraft, you know that they’re generally vast, open-world games that plop your avatar down in a digital world filled with hundreds of AI characters and literally thousands of gamers (when you tally up attendance across the many servers available). In those make-believe lands […]

Is Facebook making us depressed? For at least some users, the answer to that question may be yes, according to a new study out of the University of Missouri. Researchers there found that when Facebook users primarily use the popular social network to compare their friends’ lives to their own, the result is often envy. […]

Ever heard of a Quokka? No? Well it’s only a cute grinning critter that’s part of the latest and greatest selfie trend on Instagram right now. Oh, and they’re guaranteed to put a grin on your mug while they’re trending away. If you check out this link you’ll see that the Quokka is a smallish […]

As painful as it has always been for its victims, bullying used to be something that could be escaped by reaching the front door of your home. Now, as much as parents try to prevent it, that boundary no longer exists. Social media doesn’t have to be scary. It doesn’t have to strike fear into the […]

Technology can be a great boon to communication. But it can also be an isolating influence too, something that keeps families from talking instead of enhancing their relational ties. That’s one of the significant takeaways from Pope Francis’ recent message on the 49th World Communications Day. I’m not Catholic, but I appreciated the Pope’s recognition […]

OK, you may have already seen this since it’s casually blowing up the Internet faster than Kim Kardashian when she’s trying really hard. But I thought I’d bring it to your attention just in case. Photographer Eric Smith snapped a pic of the picture above when he was out and about in the Redondo Beach, […]

I’ve heard it said that trust is like an eraser: It gets smaller and smaller with every mistake made. And while that may appear to be true on the face of things, on social media sites it doesn’t usually seem to apply, does it? I mean, we can find ourselves burned over and over by […]

I don’t watch much TV. Oh, occasionally, I’ll tune into The Voice or American Idol or Parenthood. But, honestly, that’s about it. If TV went away completely, it wouldn’t bother me much. Except for one fairly glaring exception to everything I just wrote: live sports. This weekend, I was really looking forward to watching the […]

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ABOUT THIS BLOG

Good media discernment is about guarding our eyes and hearts before we watch or listen. And it's also about grappling with the entertainment we do see or hear. That's why the Plugged In Blog is devoted to guarding, discussing and grappling.